Pearl is far from the only or first coach to contact a prospect at midnight. Brannan Greene, now at Kansas, received 24 phone calls between 12:01 and 2:30 a.m . on the first day coaches could call juniors in 2011. Back then coaches could only call juniors once per month. 24 decided to use that one call per month to talk to Greene in the middle of the night, just to be first. Memphis head coach Josh Pastner admitted the reason coaches do this:

Although Pastner acknowledges being the first to call seldom will be the decisive factor in landing a recruit, he feels pressure to make the midnight calls each year since he knows his competitors will be.

“It’s part of making sure you have all your ‘i’s’ dotted and your ‘t’s’ crossed,” Pastner said. “It’s like in July when you’re out recruiting and you’ve seen a kid so many times that you don’t need to evaluate him anymore, but you’re there watching him anyway so nobody can say you weren’t there.”

Coaches will always feel pressure to be first or do the most in recruiting. But there is no reason it has to be in the middle of the night. Coaches talk about being worried about the intrusion that the recruiting process has on a prospect’s life, then go out and maximize that intrusion by meeting with them or calling them the second they are able to. Not to mention the intrusion on the coaches’ lives. It is tough to swallow coaches’ pleas for more rules in the name of their own work/life balance when they are willing to recruit 24/7, even if only for a day or so.

This seems like an area ripe for an NCAA rule. The burden on both prospects and coaches is relatively high. The impact on a prospect’s decision is low. The only reason some coaches recruit at midnight is because they can and the only reason they rest do is because the first group does.

There are two paths the NCAA could take. The bigger change would be to ban recruiting for some portion of the day. Coaches already are prohibited from conducting any sort of countable athletically-related activity (including practice, weights, conditioning, film, or meetings) between midnight and 5 am. Phone calls, texts, and in-person contact could be prohibited during a similar, longer period, say 10 p.m. to 6 a.m.

But that would lead to a new bunch of unintended violations and a bunch of interpretive problems. What counts: where the prospect is or whether the coach is? What if a conversation starts before 10 p.m. and continues past the time limit? Should there be an exception for programs and prospects in Alaska and Hawaii?

The simpler solution is to move the start time for any recruiting activity to something more reasonable, like 5 p.m. This would include initial dates for communication, the start of recruiting periods, and the end of recruiting restrictions on a coach or staff. Coaches will still rush to be the first to call a prospect but that barrage will happen in the evening, not in the wee hours. Some coaches might still continue calling into the night, but think about what that says to the prospect: not only were you not important enough to call first, but I’m also waking you up.

It’s easy to track, provides no additional incentive to break the rule, and has minimal interpretive questions. Coaches are already adjusted to this rhythm, all that would change is when it starts, closer to normal working hours. And after the start of communication, prospects have more power to dictate the terms of when coaches can call or text. It is such a no-brainer that it will not be surprising if it takes years for the schools to adopt such a rule.

John Infante is a Sporting News contributor. Follow Infante on Twitter: @John_Infante.